Lands of origin, source of inspirazion

Sicily and Calabria are a source of inspiration and basis for the creative imagination of Mario Trimarchi and Antonio Aricò respectively – two designers with studios in Milan but who are deeply linked to the places of their childhood and adolescence

The landscape is able to foster highly unusual conditions for design outcomes. Flora, fauna, traditions and constructions linked to a place can provide a kind of fascination which can also be a driving force in creative processes. The Pinterest boards and Instagram profiles of contemporary designers are proof of this. If we look to the past, to the times of the Grand Tour, we can find a multitude of examples of this tendency. The cribs and the interiors of the Florentine churches of the Renaissance were fundamental in shaping and consolidating the folk designs of Alexander Girard just as the link between architecture and nature first in Tyrol and then in India left its mark on the language used by Ettore Sottsass Jr.
The landscape can be a catalogue of forms from which to draw inspiration for the evolution of a style. It is also basis from which imagination can work because we are not dealing here with an industrial district and its system of actors and relationships. A landscape at the most provides a network of occasions whereby the gestures and visions that a place holds can be recalled. Affinity with a setting also offers traces which can be transformed. Mario Trimarchi and Antonio Aricò, two designers based in Milan but with deep connections to the lands of their origin, are well aware of this.

For Trimarchi Sicily forms a set of elements that he has classified and portrayed through design. His research stems from sentiment but has been transformed over time into a taxonomy of types, textures, atmospheres and materials. The analysis of the landscape has inspired products like the Time and Care range of bathroom fittings designed for the Turkish company VitrA. This project springs from the representation of the kind of untamed intertwining of aromatic plants, pools of water and ravines that is typical of Mediterranean scrub. Another example is provided by the thirteen table stands self-produced by Fragile, the studio run by Trimarchi, and called Oggetti Smarriti.

This collection is made up of a landscape of miniature works of architecture that recall petrified forests, cliffs, pergolas, hills and jagged rocks. Even the materials used (aluminium, wood, methacrylate, copper, bamboo and cane) are linked to craft skills derived from local experiences.

Mario Trimarchi, a preparatory sketch for the VitrA project (2016).

Calabria on the other hand is the operational headquarters for Antonio Aricò. The workshop in Reggio Calabria where his grandfather Saverio and uncle Fedele perform the roles of model-maker and photographer respectively represents an approach to work that is necessarily informal, nimble in scale and above all complementary to on-going work in Milan. Aricò, who has worked in Australia and Israel, uses the conditions of the Calabrian region rather than drawing on the Italian tradition. This is an area marked by contradictions and which is to a great extent unexplored, and it is here that he has chosen to develop some phases of his creative process, as with the Taste of Wood collection of furnishings and accessories, or as the setting for an installation of landscape design that he presented in the Italian Pavilion of the first London Design Biennale held last September. Bandiere stese (Flags spread out, editor’s note) – a work that was composed of a row of white sheets. These sheets were spread out in the sun and hung on the balconies of the abandoned houses of Roghudi (Reggio Calabria).

Antonio Aricò, Taste of Wood.

Today this place is a ghost town, like so many others in Calabria, a victim of a mass exodus in the 1970s to the new settlement of Roghudi Nuovo. The migration has dispersed an entire population. Identity and history have been abandoned in exchange for a questionable idea of comfort and modernity. The installation was a reflection on the flight from a south poised between a sense of surrender and the dream of return.

Founded in 1961 by Piera Peroni Abitare magazine has crossed the history of costume, architecture and design, international, following in its pages the evolution of our ways of life and how we inhabit places